Cameroon is both exceptional and inexplicable. Like much of Africa, it suffered horrendous colonial afflictions and atrocities, yet its heart remains irresistibly inviting, warm and forgiving.
When I visited the country in September 2022, I travelled by bus from Douala to Yaoundé in the evening. Thick expanses of darkness loomed like deities in their own right. The pitch-blackness of Africa makes it unfailingly intriguing; I can think of nothing else to compare it to.
Cameroon is a country of thirty million souls speaking some two hundred and fifty languages. Like the Democratic Republic of Congo or Nigeria, it is incredibly diverse; unlike them it has had only two heads of state since its independence in 1960: Ahmadou Ahidjo and Paul Biya, who, at almost 93, recently ‘won’ another presidential term.
Its old, brittle languages are at risk of disappearing as a result of the logic of standardisation, homogenisation and globalisation, and along with them, deep histories, knowledges and cultures. But who cares? We have French and English to make us entirely new beings, bold and intrepid adventurers in a rapidly post-humanising world. To hell with diversity—it should be subsumed under the thumb of monoculture. This is the tunnel vision that would denude the world.
Is Cameroon sacrificing its irreplaceable cultural and linguistic riches in a bid to become more legible to the world? Which country or region has done the same for it?
As we meandered out of Douala on the five-hour journey to Yaoundé, I saw bustling open-air markets with rickety wooden tables piled high with huge bananas, stacks of mineral water, peeled oranges and fresh tomatoes; a riot of tropical colours splashed over dust and mud. I heard the deep calls of the earth within the thick shrubs and undergrowth. The experience shook my spirit and purged it of vanity and worldly cares. I truly felt that I belonged, opening up to the inexplicable power and allure of that enveloping place.
During this particular trip, I was accommodated at the Ekounou Campus of the Université Catholique de l’Afrique Centrale. One night, browbeaten by swarms of whining mosquitoes, I took a walk with another resident to purchase a can of insect repellent. The campus, empty of students, looked deserted, although its Olympic-sized swimming pool gleamed under a row of lights. As we ventured outside the gates, the formalism of Catholicism gave way to raucous music and conviviality, with makeshift taverns and kiosks, and a steady stream of easy-going revellers.
While Douala is a humid, teaming commercial city, Yaoundé is nestled gracefully amid seven legendary hills. Here, Africa serves out her heart on a divine tray of lush greens, plentiful alcohol and delicious seafood. Alongside the notable Cameroonian joie de vivre is the city’s world-class intellectual heritage. Indeed, Yaoundé is a university town renowned for its academic pursuits and intellectual reflection.
Catholicism continues to exert a powerful influence over the social and intellectual lives of Cameroonians. The Université Catholique de l’Afrique Centrale has nurtured many outstanding philosophical minds, caught between the constraints of formal religion and the pursuit of open-ended academic enquiry. Notably, there have been cases in the country where experienced philosophy scholars, at the beginning of their careers, have attempted to chart a course of genuine intellectual independence outside of the traditional options offered by their faith.
Beyond the university’s hallowed walls, Africa looms and hurtles with yet to be fathomed mysteries, its self-replicating imagery lurching like innumerable buried seas. Perhaps it is this existential contradiction that fuels Cameroon’s fertile intellectual culture, a culture that produced thinkers such as Marcien Towa, Engelbert Mveng, Jean-Marc Ela, Bernard Fonlon, Fabien Eboussi Boulaga, Achille Mbembe, Francis B Nyamnjoh, and others, who grappled with the limitations and expectations of official doctrine, while formulating philosophical positions that challenged and rewrote them.
It is a simmering tension probably as old as colonialism itself. I witnessed personally a seemingly multicultural European who was so comfortable in Yaoundé that he casually hopped on a commercial motorbike (okada) and disappeared into the night, blithely proclaiming the philosophical vacuity of the Southern African concept of Ubuntu. When I had asked him about humankind’s future amid the rise of artificial intelligence, transhumanism and the logic of algorithms, he unequivocally declared it was a dark, dystopian, Orwellian nightmare.
In that case, wouldn’t it make sense for Africa to seek answers within itself? Should we not retrace our steps back to the continent’s true heart to better hear its drumbeat?
This existential question is perhaps rarely posed in such stark terms, but I couldn’t help but notice nature fighting back amid peripheral capitalism, skewed development objectives, truncated national dreams and sheer, sweaty survivalism. It seemed like a make-or-break moment, when each day began with the frantic struggle to make it to the next dawn.
At first, this proposed retracing of steps may seem an overly simplistic approach. However, the determination to see it through to the end is awe-inspiring in its complexity.
In Cameroon, the study of philosophy is accorded an exalted status within the education system. Students are taught the discipline once they reach high school, and at postgraduate level, numerous WhatsApp groups are devoted to discussing the subject, with subscribers fervently debating issues of mutual interest. While these virtual communities may be small, there is an uncommon vibrancy to their deliberations.
I recall a memorable figure from the mid-nineteen-eighties, when I was learning French at the Alliance Française de Lagos in Victoria Island. I would often spend hours in the centre’s library, which was full of intellectual treasures. Always present was a Cameroonian scholar; upright, bespectacled, and always impeccably dressed, with a tie to match. He would analyse world affairs with me, as well as events in his native Cameroon. His analyses were invariably well-researched and considered. He was everything I had always imagined a Cameroonian intellectual to be.
In my conversations with a number of young Cameroonian philosophers during my visit to their country, I learnt of the difficult life of Fabien Eboussi Boulaga, a philosopher formerly with the Jesuit Order who lost his job at the University of Yaounde for instigating a student rebellion. He then moved to the Université Catholique d’Afrique Centrale, but was dismissed there too, espousing agnosticism and incipient mysticism, which conflicted directly with traditional Catholic dogma. Despite these career-altering battles, Eboussi Boulaga cultivated a reputation for philosophical rigour, amassing a small band of supporters who remained loyal even when he was ostracised by officialdom. He died in obscurity in 2018, weighed down by frustration, controversy and misunderstanding.
Eboussi Boulaga’s main problem stemmed from his attempt to reconcile Catholic indoctrination with genuine philosophical enquiry, a pursuit that eventually became a dominant feature of his radical thought. Having previously been a priest, he was excommunicated by the Catholic church for writing a scathing critique of its religious practices in Africa. Rather than renounce his anti-Catholic views, he embraced a life of penury and ostracism. Today, vestiges of his life-altering struggle can be seen in the questing minds of Cameroonians searching for liberal philosophical truths.
Engelbert Mveng, an extraordinarily talented Jesuit priest with expertise in anthropology, history, philosophy and the visual arts, was murdered in 1995 in circumstances that remain unsolved to this day. While Ruben Um Nyobè sought Cameroonian liberation in the political sphere, Mveng arguably pursued the same goal in the realms of consciousness and the mind. No one can forget the torment of losing such brilliant minds to senseless tragedy. The loss shrouds the entire soul of the country in tropical malaise and melancholy.
During my journey from Douala to Yaoundé, I was kindly joined by Eric Vernuy Suyru, a political scientist, who discussed with me the political and cultural history of Cameroon. I learnt about the formidable Um Nyobè, an incontrovertible pioneer in Cameroon’s struggle for independence. Verny ranked him alongside other leading African liberation heroes, such as Kwame Nkrumah, Amilcar Cabral, Robert Sobukwe, Patrice Lumumba, Samora Machel and Thomas Sankara. When I visited the country, his widow was still living in the house he had built.
Um Nyobè’s brutal death haunts Cameroon until this day. Achille Mbembe has vividly described how the liberation hero, his family and his close associates were hunted through the forests after he had strongly opposed the continuation of French colonial rule. He was eventually shot and killed by the French army in 1958. His body was subsequently desecrated, and concerted attempts were made to erase any memory of him.
Decades after Um Nyobè’s violent end, rebels fighting for the liberation of Anglophone Ambazonia within Cameroon captured, tortured and beheaded a government customs official. She was stripped naked, flailed and dragged through the mud—as Um Nyobè had been—as the rebels defiled her with bayonets. While the colonial authorities had violated and murdered Um Nyobè in an attempt to dehumanise him, the children of the postcolonial era, seeking a different kind of liberation, had become the perpetrators of the very same depths of desecration—all captured on camera and posted online.
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One of the highlights of my visit to Cameroon was a trip from Yaoundé to the coastal town of Kribi. Yaoundé is full of undulating landscapes of red earth, where ingrained yet fragile traditionalisms jostle with the encroaching wave of contemporary influences. Dust-sprayed trees and vegetation loom amid crumbling and unfinished buildings, which in turn emerge from verdant hills. The extended scenes of tranquility are punctuated by suffocating traffic jams. Rustic and urban life interact constantly, in jolting conversation. Everywhere there are open-ended possibilities that could lead to social collapse or veer towards remarkable growth and development.
We travelled through Edéa, a town that still bears the mark of German colonial intervention, being largely Protestant while many other parts of the country are dominated by Catholicism. Incidentally, the Germans were among the first European visitors to Cameroon in modern times, although it is arguably the French and the British who left more enduring legacies. Not only did these European colonialists impose their institutional practices and cultures, they also bequeathed, more tellingly, their languages. The rebels of Ambazonia are, of course, products of these fractious legacies.
A few churches were visible from the highway. Gigantic billboards displayed images of the ageing Paul Biya and his youthful wife, in lurid public displays of power and (dis)unity.
As we entered Kribi, the central business district exuded a kind of Edenic tranquillity. The surroundings had been sleepy and lush with vegetation, and the air fresh. Now things became a little more hectic and uprooted. There was even a nightclub, intriguingly called the Copa Cabana, after the famous Brazilian resort. The beaches around the pristine and slightly enigmatic Lobé falls were uniformly tourist friendly, complete with lifeguards, motorised canoes and inviting bamboo shelters. The falls themselves consist of rocks, dense greenery and cascading, translucent waters. A dusky, sombre shroud further adds to the sense of mystery.
Amid our intense reflections on questions of epistemology, ethics and normativity, we were buoyed by the excellent Cameroonian dishes of grilled fish and miondo—a dough-like cassava based dish—served with leafy green eru.
As I prepared to return to Cape Town, I felt a slight tinge of sadness. I had been offered an enticing glimpse of the possibility and promise of humanity—against a backdrop of galloping landscapes, unfettered vegetation, ever-thickening swirls of darkness and feral swarms of humming mosquitoes—alongside countless hearts that beat in harmony with the rhythms of the earth.
- Sanya Osha is a Cape Town-based scholar and writer, was until recently, a fellow of the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study.
